So three nannies said that they prefer to work 3-5 hours a week and not 20, one said that she is actually looking to work for the government (and had to come out all the way to my house to figure out I’m not the government, I guess), one didn’t show up for the interview at all with no warning. And these are all women in their fifties and sixties. Younger candidates show such incredible entitlement and such incapacity to stay in a dialogue instead of slipping into a monologue that it never even gets to the point of scheduling an interview.

In our town, one can get world-class service in what concerns skilled work. My dentist is sensational, my massage therapist and hair stylist could easily be working in any world capital, the realtor and the banker are super professional, restorateurs are out-of-this-world good. But as for low-skill work, it’s impossible to get anybody to do it with any degree of reliability or work ethic. 

Just one example but I have more. During the first pregnancy, I wanted somebody to come over and clean the house. The local agency said they only send out teams of three cleaners and you have to pay for all three. When they arrived, it turned out that one of the cleaners was a child of maybe 11 or 12. The child clearly didn’t do any work and ended up breaking one of the glass flowers I had in a vase and trying to conceal the damage. But I had to pay for the child to be there, breaking things, because that’s the only way to get cleaners. The whole experience cost a lot (A LOT) of money and the results were entirely inbisible. Of course, I didn’t repeat the experiment.

Casual work around the house, lawn-mowing – it’s a struggle to get any of that done in this town and it’s always unreliable and aggravating. And everybody else I know around here has the same (or sometimes even worse experience).

I always loudly and angrily disagreed with people who argued that mass immigration into developed countries was caused by local people refusing to do low-skilled* work like gardening, cleaning, cooking, child and elderly care, etc. The very idea seemed ridiculous to me. And now I’m discovering that I was wrong this whole time. I hate to be proven so entirely wrong but I can’t deny the mounting evidence any longer. So reader valter07 and others who made this argument: you were right this entire time and I was wrong.

We currently don’t have any immigrants other than college professors in this town. But capitalism operates on the demand/supply principle. There is demand for this sort of work, and it is inevitable that it will eventually be met. 

And then the locals will become very angered that immigrants “steal” their jobs and will vote for the future equivalent of Trump.

* Low-skilled is not necessarily low-paid. What I’m trying to offer prospective nannies (including very good benefits, by the way) and what cleaners, handymen, mowers, etc. charge is anything but low-paid.